The British Academy is hosting a one-day symposium on ‘Romanticism and
Science’, in association with the British Association for Romantic Studies
to be held on 15th September 2006 at the British Academy, 10 Carlton House
Terrace, London, SW1.
All welcome
In the past, Romanticism has been seen as opposed to science, held as
promoting the transcendental and otherworldly above the material and
physical. This symposium seeks to interrogate this view, exploring a time
before the sciences and the arts had been divided into ‘two cultures’.
Science pervaded every aspect of Romantic life and literature, as the
secondary object of exploration detailed in travel narratives, the emergence
of new print technologies, the use of anatomy in religious arguments for
evidence of Design in nature, or physiological accounts of the effects of an
encounter with the sublime in aesthetic theories. The speakers in this
symposium will challenge traditional notions of Romanticism, revealing that
even the most canonical Romantic writers were aware of and interested in
scientific knowledge and discoveries.
9.30–10am: Registration and Tea/ coffee
10–11am: Professor Richard Holmes (FBA, University of East Anglia),
‘Scientific discovery and the poets’
11am–12pm: Dr Neil Vickers (King’s College, London), ‘Carcase Coleridge or
Coleridge and the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century medical case’
12–1pm: Lunch
1–2pm: Dr Sharon Ruston (University of Wales, Bangor), ‘Natural Rights and
Natural History’
2–2.30pm: Tea/coffee
2.30–3.30pm: Professor Peter Kitson (University of Dundee), ‘The Limits of
the Human: Frankenstein, Anatomy and Racial Science’
3.30–4.30pm: Professor Timothy Fulford (Nottingham Trent University), ‘The
Anatomy of Racism: What Natural History Saw in Native People’s Skulls’
Organiser: Sharon Ruston, University of Wales, Bangor
To register for this event, please contact:
The Meetings Department
Telephone: 020 7969 5246
Email: [log in to unmask]
For further details and to book, please refer to
http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/2006/romanticism/prog.html
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